Marceau is a New York City taxi driver who talks to animals and understands their language, flies on the back of an eagle and a whale and travels all over the world to rescue animals and people in trouble.

Or so Joe Brown, a Jewish lawyer from Lincolnwood, used to tell his young children as he tucked them into bed.

Fast-forward some 50 years. Brown is getting ready to retire from his law practice. One of his children has become famous - she's Bobbi Brown, celebrity makeup artist, head of her own cosmetics company, frequent morning TV show guest and author of a number of books on makeup and beauty.

A few years back, she was searching for something special to do for her dad's 70th birthday when she remembered the Marceau adventures. Joe Brown had written them down on yellow legal paper but hadn't thought about them for decades.

Without telling him, Bobbi Brown had some of the stories made into books, complete with illustrations, and placed them in a bookstore. Then she arranged for herself, one of her sons and her father to walk past the shop. Of that moment, Joe Brown recalls, "My grandson said, I want to get a book. I walked in and saw those books. I freaked out. This was the greatest gift I'd ever gotten."

Brown gave her dad 100 copies of the book, but she didn't stop there. When she showed the volume to a friend who is the president of Scholastic Books, the friend was so enchanted with the tales that she arranged for one of them to be published by Scholastic, a well-known children's book house. "The Flights of Marceau: The Race to the Rescue," in which the magical cabby rides a cheetah to rescue zoo animals stranded by Hurricane Katrina, was the result.

Meanwhile Joe Brown, now 74, reawakened to his potential as a writer (his daughter "restarted his motor," as he puts it) and penned more Marceau stories. Scholastic is planning to bring out more books and Brown and a co-author have just completed a screenplay based on the stories. He also began going to Chicago-area schools to read the books and show students the original oil paintings that were used for the illustrations.

He credits his grandchildren - he and his wife, Lola, have 13 altogether from their "merged marriage" - with giving him ideas for the new Marceau stories.

In a recent interview, Joe Brown marveled at his newfound second career, which he attributes in part to his "Jewish roots" and the Jewish stories he heard as a child. He grew up in a family of Russian immigrants "steeped in Judaism," he says.

The books had a humble beginning. "I remembered reading an adventure where the hero's name was Henri. I thought, I could write something that exciting, so I used the (French) name Marceau. 'Tale' happened to rhyme with 'whale' so I went from there and that's what gave me the idea for the entire life of Marceau. He is a New York City taxicab driver who is bored with his job and imagines these incredible adventures. He has a superpower - he can talk to and interact with animals of every kind, and he has adventures with these animals," Brown says.

He added definitions for some of the words used in the stories that now appear on every page as an educational tool.

"I was a lawyer in Chicago for 50 years, raising a family," he says. "I always liked to write and always had a goal" to become a published author, "but I had to make a living for the family. I told my kids these stories and they would say, tell me the one you told last week. I would forget it, so I wrote them down. Then I forgot about them for 30 years."

Bobbi Brown, for her part, is as thrilled with the new developments as her father is. In an e-mail message, she writes that "my dad has always believed in me 100 percent. He has supported me with every decision I made about school, my career, etc. I owe my success and who I am today to him. ... Now he is a successful author of educational children's books. You never know where life will take you. It wasn't until he retired from being a successful lawyer his whole life that his true passion was revealed to him."

Joe Brown returns the favor, saying of his famous daughter that "as successful and rich as she is, she is the nicest, most real person and the best daughter. Her family is so much more important to her than her business."

He finds it "freaky" that she became so famous. "She's from the neighborhood, just like me," he says. "She used to be Joe Brown's daughter, then I became Bobbi Brown's father. Now I wonder, did I spark her imagination, or did she spark my imagination?"

As a grandfather, "he is so doting," Bobbi Brown writes in her e-mail. "My boys love to read and are very excited to see their grandfather's stories being published. My father used to tell them the stories of Marceau when they were little so they are very proud of him!"

This is just the beginning for him," she writes. "I hope that he continues to publish more of Marceau's stories in the years to come. They really are amazing books with clever rhymes, beautiful illustrations and best of all, they teach the kids with the vocabulary tools that appear on each page."

Joe Brown adds that his wife is also happy with the new developments. "She was always wondering, if I retire what was she going to do with me? Am I going to follow her to the mall? What I'm doing now is so utterly rewarding that I'm going into my retired years as eagerly and happily as can be."